A decent flawed attempt...

This drama was a constant coin toss for me. Sometimes it was good and enjoyable while other times it was over-sentimental, cringe and dull. Although the drama was 36 episodes long and packs a lot of events but most of these events were shoved together into the last 1/3 of the drama while the first 2/3 were very stretched out with little to no movement. The romance was treated as an instrument to push the main lead down or to bring him back up, not really romantic. Baek Do Yang character needed more attention especially that we had an abundance of free time. The last 5-10 minutes had a really unnecessary last minute maneuver. Anyway, the drama is good enough to be watchable but with a big asterisk.

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On the verge of meh-ness...

Although it's politically themed drama but it's a watered-down surface-level politics and the excessive overdramatization didn't fit its theme. Repeating the exact same dramatic flashbacks multiple times throughout both seasons further highlights my point. It ended up relying on these melo moments rather than having a better written political drama and a more engaging dialogues as you would expect from a good political drama to have. What also didn't fit its theme is the male lead constant overreacting and overacting for his role. The romance of the main leads and the pair up of the secondary leads were all out of place. On the other hand, the OST was nice, it reminded me of Comrades (2010). The drama is okay if it was your first political drama, can serve as an easy introduction to the genre.

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Poor attempt

I don't even feel like typing much for this one. The drama was increasingly unreasonably frustrating to watch with each passing minute out of the 1440 minutes runtime. It's a shame that the talent and the budget had went into this drama.

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Decent

Turned out to be a decent story. I really appreciated how it focuses on the individuals with a reasonable scoop while taking into consideration their surrounding rather than throwing in mindless connections to make the story more grand without relevant purpose such as wars/nations/kingdoms/factions. Although it started to lean a little bit into the other side towards the end, unfortunately, this is the fault of its runtime. Which brings me to my next point, the drama is definitely too long for its content and it would benefit greatly if it were to be condensed down to ~25 episodes, it would make a much more compelling package. Because of this, the drama had a serious issue with flashbacks. There was a one piece of dialogue that was repeated almost every other episode for its entire runtime, a bit too much! I liked the first 2/3 more than the last 1/3, things were changing at an unreasonable pace as we were approaching the end, you may say it was rushed. The last ~10 episodes were full of rapid changes where the drama felt like it lost it direction and didn't know how to stir it towards the end. The production seems to be passable despite its flaws even when taking into consideration that this was made in the early 2000s. Some scenes you will notice some great attention to details while other scenes you can see the tape of their fake facial hair.

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Decent

The drama has its appeal despite the handful of small annoyances sprinkled throughout. Every single character has a trait or two which was over-amplified a bit too much that it came off as overbearing and annoying. The writer was trying too hard to force the viewers to sympathize with In Soon that it took away from her value as a character but it got better later on or maybe I just got too used to it that I subconsciously ignored it. The conclusion could've been better, some characters were brushed off just to wrap it up quickly. Where this drama shines and gets its appeal is with a handful of moments here and there where the writer shows his prowess with its dialogue away from the goofiness. Moreover, my favorites are the ones where the silence surrounds everything, no background music, no dialogue, no movement, everything is consumed by the void while some static images play in succession.

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Lazy!

This entire drama was like babysitting children. The amount of fights and ear piercing screams was mind numbing. Having a loud fight for every other scene is one of the worst ways to create tension. Its weight and impact diminish and become redundant the more they result to the same tactics.

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Another one...

The first episode was remarkably bad and dull, how did they expect to pull in the viewers with that? This drama is a strong contender for the worst high-class society themed drama. It's as bad-ugly as the architecture of the house they are living in. Not only that, the mystery element was utterly garbage and redundant which also led to a weak climax and reveal. Poor attempt to throw in teasers of the big event at the end of every episode. Everyone turned to a softy and no one went too far for the sake of this artificial sismance moments everyone was having. Any subplot the drama tried to throw in ended up being as sloppy and underdeveloped as you can imagine. The cast was fine but that wasn't enough to make the drama serviceable.

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Disappointing

The production seems to be as bare-bones as they could come from the 2000s. A drama can still be functional even with the roughest cuts if other aspects held up which, unfortunately, isn't the case here. The writing was a big sloppy mess, incoherent, disconnected from reality and unbelievably corny, especially the older cast. The drama ended up with too many loose ends, these plot threads left untouched despite constantly building them up throughout the drama. For example, the story constantly hinted that Yoon Young and her husband were going to have marital problems and that was going to be their story but we never got to that point, making all the scenes including them leading up to that moment completely redundant. The writing definitely affected the cast's performance. You may have been excited to see the leads to be different from the typical young-blood dolled up faces but they don't bring much to this specific project, in fact, it's embarrassing to watch them here when you they're definitely more capable than that. They were in their 50s at the time but were acting like the typical shy 20s boy-girl for their romantic scenes. Speaking of cast members, I ALWAYS hated how Kim Hye Ok sounds when she screams or cries but this drama turned it up to 11. You may or may not develop tinnitus from the unbelievable intense screeching.

There was a transgender subplot and let's just say that the drama handled it as you would imagine Korean writers would do. The drama may seems promising from the surface but it's a big let down.

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Poor mystery

The first episode won't encourage anyone to continue, it started off everything on the wrong foot. It relies heavily on flashbacks which makes the story continuity poor and loose since the writer can stir the mystery in any direction without much consideration on it being coherent or whatsoever. It's too long for such an insignificant piece of mystery. Things didn't get any better once all the mystery was revealed because of poor build up and a joke of an antagonist. I wouldn't label it as a mystery drama anyway, the majority of the drama seems preoccupied with portraying arrogance and high-class lifestyles, leaving only a minimal portion of the actual story and mystery. Even then, we didn't start to get much information until episode 9-10 which is too late. They made the FL's kid narrate most of the last episode like an adult which was weird. Cha Do Young was an utterly useless character, her character was meant to be a comedic relief and a filler but she was nothing but a horny bait. It's probably the weakest drama I've seen from Cho Yeo Jung.

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Could've been better....

It took forever before the story started progressing. It could've been easily condensed down to 7-8 episodes without sacrificing anything. The amount of plot convinces was unbelievable. A common example is whenever a piece of information is about to be revealed, it magically get sabotaged in the most blatant way there is. Throughout the entire drama it felt it was building towards something big but it never got there and the resolution of the culprits was underwhelming anyway. The drama in general was riddled with all kind of problems but the big cast was pulling it up so damn hard.

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